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EDITED BY HENRY SUZZALLO 

PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 
TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



EDUCATION 

AN ESSAY 

AND OTHER SELECTIONS 

BY 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 




HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

BOSTON, NEW YORK AND CHICAGO 



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COPYRIGHT, 1SS3, BY EDWARD W. EMERSON 

COPYRIGHT, 19C9, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



• • 1 
• . » 



EDITOR'S NOTE 

The Riverside Educational Mono- 
graphs 

Modern education not fully apprehended 

Progress in educational theory has been so rapid 
in recent years, and changes in school-room prac- 
tice have been made with such frequency, that 
many parents and teachers have failed to grasp 
the meaning of the new movements in education. 
This is not a matter for blame ; it is character- 
istic of any period of transition such as ours. As 
we have become conscious of the need of modi- 
fications in our school system to meet changing 
social conditions, we have attempted a welding 
of new ideals to old traditions, with the inevitable 
result that not a little waste and confusion have 
attended the administration of our schools. 

As education grows scientific it tends to become 
less intelligible to the public 

Fortunately, the significance of our modern 
education is constantly becoming clearer to those 
who are studying its problems and results in the 
light of the contributions from the fields of Psy- 

• • • 

in 



EDITOR'S NOTE 

chology, Sociology, and Biology. More than ever 
before, educational theory and practice rest upon 
scientific truths. But as educational thought pro- 
gresses it becomes increasingly difficult to keep 
leader, teacher, parent, and citizen in close con- 
tact. With a growing technical terminology, the 
educational thinker tends to speak in a dialect 
difficult for the ordinary person to comprehend ; 
and in addition, the educational specialist, to a 
larger extent than ever before, publishes his con- 
tributions in the proceedings of some learned 
society or in some other equally inaccessible 
place. The result is that as education has become 
more exact and scientific, it has tended to isolate 
itself from the understanding of people. It is 
necessary, therefore, that the thoughts of these 
leaders be transmitted to the rank and file — to 
all trainers of youth, to parents as well as to 
teachers. To meet this need, this series of Mon- 
ographs is presented to the public with the hope 
that it may prove a contribution to the move- 
ment for a more general understanding of the 
progressive tendencies in American education. 

The public must understand its schools 

In a society such as ours, there are many 
reasons why educational institutions should be 

iv 



EDITOR'S NOTE 

popularly understood. Imperial edicts and bu- 
reaucratic decrees do not shape the spirit and 
method of our education. Each locality deter- 
mines the particular form of organization of its 
schools, and the tacit agreement of the communi- 
ties throughout the country gives the common 
stock of ideals which makes our teaching national 
in purpose. 

Evidently then, it does not suffice that educa- 
tional leaders alone should know the significance 
of a given reform or movement ; the public must 
also understand and accept the proposed policy. 
The intellectual channels between leader and 
follower, profession and populace, must be kept 
open. Then our schools will be guided in the spirit 
of our democratic institutions ; they will avoid un- 
wise and unnecessary innovations, and necessary 
reforms will be more substantially achieved. 

Intelligent parental cooperation needed 

In the nineteenth century our people had an 
over-faith in the efficacy of school education. 
To-day, we have a better understanding of the 
limitations of the school. We have come to real- 
ize that the sphere of education embraces the 
whole of life, in school and out ; that many dif- 
ferent agencies are required to make a cultured 






EDITOR'S NOTE 

and efficient man. The school can do much, but 
there are aspects of life it cannot reach. The 
family has a rare power over the child, but it has 
special impotencies of its own. 

Likewise other institutions offer but a partial 
training. It requires the cooperation of them all 
to develop the man of vision and power needed 
to-day. How, then, can the work of education be 
done unless others beside the teacher under- 
stand its aims and methods? Parents in particu- 
lar must cooperate with the school if they would 
tide their children over moral and intellectual 
difficulties. And such cooperation requires the 
kind of understanding that comes not alone 
through sympathy, necessary as this is, but also 
through an acquaintance with the controlling and 
progressive tendencies in our education. 

The education of teachers 

It is probably true that the average teacher 
has none too clear an appreciation of much that is 
presented in our educational discussions. Indeed, 
it has been urged that there is a growing ten- 
dency for the superintendents of large and some- 
what centralized systems of schools to make 
sweeping changes in school-room procedure with- 
out consulting, and, what is more serious, with- 

vi 



EDITOR'S NOTE 

out convincing the body of teachers of the neces- 
sity for such changes. If this be true, and there 
are certainly many evidences of such a tendency, 
then it indicates a serious fault which must be 
combated, for there can be no true profession of 
teaching where most of its members are required 
to carry out official orders mechanically. A clear 
understanding of underlying principles is essen- 
tial to good teaching. Facts and methods are of 
little avail without this. In the art of minister- 
ing to the intellectual and moral crises of child- 
hood so that strong free men shall be reared, 
the spiritual worker should fully comprehend the 
meaning of the plan. Fortunately, there are many 
practical leaders who realize that they must carry 
the teachers of the staff with them in all pro- 
gressive reforms, not alone as a matter of respect 
for the teacher's personality, but as a matter of 
necessity in getting the high and subtle work of 
the school done. These will welcome any move- 
ment that will aid in the dissemination of the 
best professional knowledge and belief among 
the teachers of the country. 

The scope of the Educational Monographs 

To accomplish these large purposes, the vol- 
umes of this series are offered, the plan being 

vn 



EDITOR'S NOTE 

to present carefully selected writings upon edu- 
cation in convenient and attractive pocket edi- 
tions at a small cost. Usually but a single phase 
of education will be treated in a given number. 
The series will, however, finally include every 
aspect of our best educational thought, from the 
general statements of theory to the more specific 
and concrete details of school-room practice. 



CONTENTS 



Introduction xi 

I. Education i 

The complete essay, " Education," in Lectures 
and Biographical Sketches 

II. Culture in Education . . -35 

From " Culture," in The Conduct of Life 

III. Education for Power ... 45 

From " Power," in The Conduct of Life 

IV. The Training of Manual Work . 65 

From " Man the Reformer," in Nature, Ad- 
dresses, and Lectures 

Outline 75 



INTRODUCTION 

The worth of Emerson s views 

This first volume of the Riverside Educational 
Monographs presents the views of Ralph Waldo 
Emerson regarding education. It consists of the 
entire essay on " Education," and several addi- 
tional selections from his other writings. By no 
means a complete exposition of his philosophy 
of education, the material presents his funda- 
mental beliefs with regard to the proper aims 
and methods which should be pursued in the 
liberal training of men and women. Written for 
the most part a generation ago, the subjects 
discussed are those which are of vital concern to- 
day. With rare penetration the essayist reveals 
the essential nature of the problems which every- 
where arise in the effort to train free men. 

A broad human training 

In these days when we are necessarily so 
largely engaged in adding to our traditional edu- 
cation a system of specialized vocational training 
in the industrial, agricultural, and commercial 
arts, there is a danger that we shall lose our 

xi 



INTRODUCTION 

sense of proportion, forgetting the full signifi- 
cance of that older liberal education which is 
designed to equip man for the finer uses of his 
manhood and his citizenship. 

There is no better brief for a broad, human 
education than that presented in the writings of 
Emerson. Our best American apostle of culture, 
he notes with precision the qualities which are 
the measure of a truly cultivated man. With high 
critical power, he describes the futility and the 
narrowness of much that goes under the guise 
of human training in the schools, and ably de- 
fends the larger cause of spiritual development, 
despite the failures to achieve it in the class- 
room. When sharp competition forces us to a 
serious consideration of aschool training for bread 
winning, it is well to be told that the glorified 
word efficiency means spiritual efficiency as much 
as economic competency. 

Men and nature as means 

It is not alone in stating the need and the aim 
of broad human training that these views of a 
master mind are valuable. There is contributed 
also a clear understanding of the means by which 
men are to be cultivated. He points out that it 
is not through books alone that men are to be 

xii 



INTRODUCTION 

educated. The basic training is to come through 
direct contact with things and men, — nature and 
society. Then books, interpreted by an experi- 
ence-stocked imagination, will be more than 
words and dead languages. They will lift the 
student out of his own time and place to a larger 
and truer view of life through history, literature, 
and the other studies. The distinctly modern 
emphasis of nature study, manual work, play, and 
other social contacts as the foundation of a sound 
education, is just beginning to be realized in our 
school practice. 

Teaching method as adjustment to the child 

There is no better poised critic of our teach- 
ing methods than Emerson. He demonstrates 
clearly that the strenuous haste of the instructor 
to place a uniform coating of knowledge over the 
minds of children does not induce growth, and it 
cannot be called education. The child, as well as 
knowledge, needs to be understood. Human im- 
pulses, interests, and necessities, as well as sub- 
ject matter, furnish the opportunities for the guid- 
ance of childhood. The individuality of a child 
must be respected quite as much as the individu- 
ality of a fact. " Respect the child, respect him to 
the end, but also respect yourself. Be the com- 

• • • 

xm 



INTRODUCTION 

panion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, 
the lover of his virtues, but no kinsman of his sin." 
Here is expressed all the naturalism of our modern 
education, but with no suggestion of its faults. 



EDUCATION 



EDUCATION 

A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap 
at any price. The use of the world is that man 
may learn its laws. And the human race have 
wisely signified their sense of this, by calling 
wealth, means, — Man being the end. Language 
is always wise. 

Therefore I praise New England because it is 
the country in the world where is the freest ex- 
penditure for education. We have already taken, 
at the planting of the Colonies (for aught I 
know for the first time in the world), the initial 
step, which for its importance might have been 
resisted as the most radical of revolutions, thus 
deciding at the start the destiny of this country, 
— this, namely, that the poor man, whom the law 
does not allow to take an ear of corn when starv- 
ing, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is 
allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the 
rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you 
will, but as I will : not alone in the elements, 
but, by further provision, in the languages, in 



EMERSON 

sciences, in the useful and in elegant arts. The 
child shall be taken up by the State, and taught, 
at the public cost, the rudiments of knowledge, 
and at last, the ripest results of art and science. 

Humanly speaking, the school, the college, 
society, make the difference between men. All 
the fairy tales of Aladdin or the invisible Gyges 
or the talisman that opens kings' palaces or the 
enchanted halls underground or in the sea, are 
only fictions to indicate the one miracle of intel- 
lectual enlargement. When a man stupid becomes 
a man inspired, when one and the same man 
passes out of the torpid into the perceiving state, 
leaves the din of trifles, the stupor of the senses, 
to enter into the quasi-omniscience of high 
thought, — up and down, around, all limits dis- 
appear. No horizon shuts down. He sees things 
in their causes, all facts in their connection. 

One of the problems of history is the begin- 
ning of civilization. The animals that accompany 
and serve man make no progress as races. Those 
called domestic are capable of learning of man a 
few tricks of utility or amusement, but they can- 
not communicate the skill to their race. Each 
individual must be taught anew. The trained dog 
cannot train another dog. And Man himself in 
many races retains almost the unteachableness of 

2 



EDUCATION 

the beast. For a thousand years the islands and 
forests of a great part of the world have been 
filled with savages who made no steps of advance 
in art or skill beyond the necessity of being fed 
and warmed. Certain nations, with a better brain 
and usually in more temperate climates, have 
made such progress as to compare with these as 
these compare with the bear and the wolf. 

Victory over things is the office of man. Of 
course, until it is accomplished, it is the war and 
insult of things over him. His continual tendency, 
his great danger, is to overlook the fact that the 
world is only his teacher, and the nature of sun 
and moon, plant and animal only means of arous- 
ing his interior activity. Enamoured of their 
beauty, comforted by their convenience, he seeks 
them as ends, and fast loses sight of the fact 
that they have worse than no values, that they 
become noxious, when he becomes their slave. 
iThis apparatus of wants and faculties, this 
craving body, whose organs ask all the elements 
and all the functions of Nature for their satis- 
faction, educate the wondrous creature which 
they satisfy with light, with heat, with water, 
with wood, with bread, with wool. The necessi- 
ties imposed by this most irritable and all-related 
texture have taught Man hunting, pasturage, 

3 



EMERSON 

agriculture, commerce, weaving, joining, ma- 
sonry, geometry, astronomy. Here is a world 
pierced and belted with natural laws, and fenced 
and planted with civil partitions and properties, 
which aU put new restraints on the young in- 
habitant/ He too must come into this magic cir- 
cle of relations, and know health and sickness, 
the fear of injury, the desire of external good, 
the charm of riches, the charm of power. The 
household is a school of power. There, within 
the door, learn the tragi-comedy of human life. 
Here is the sincere thing, the wondrous compo- 
sition for which day and night go round. In that 
routine are the sacred relations, the passions 
that bind and sever. Here is poverty and all the 
wisdom its hated necessities can teach, here labor 
drudges, here affections glow, here the secrets of 
character are told, the guards of man, the guards 
of woman, the compensations which, like angels 
of justice, pay every debt : the opium of custom, 
whereof all drink and many go mad. Here is 
Economy, and Glee, and Hospitality, and Cere- 
mony, and Frankness, and Calamity, and Death, 
and Hope. 

Every one has a trust of power, — every man, 
every boy a jurisdiction, whether it be over a 
cow or a rood of a potato-field, or a fleet of ships, 

4 



EDUCATION 

or the laws of a state. And what activity the 
desire of power inspires ! What toils it sustains! 
How it sharpens the perceptions and stores the 
memory with facts. Thus a man may well spend 
many years of life in trade. It is a constant 
teaching of the laws of matter and of mind. No 
dollar of property can be created without some 
direct communication with Nature, and of course 
some acquisition of knowledge and practical 
force. It is a constant contest with the active 
faculties of men, a study of the issues of one 
and another course of action, an accumulation 
of power, and, if the higher faculties of the in- 
dividual be from time to time quickened, he will 
gain wisdom and virtue from his business. 

As every wind draws music out of the ^olian 
harp, so doth every object in Nature draw music 
out of his mind. Is it not true that every land- 
scape I behold, every friend I meet, every act I 
perform, every pain I suffer, leaves me a differ- 
ent being from that they found me ? That 
poverty, love, authority, anger, sickness, sorrow, 
success, all work actively upon our being and 
unlock for us the concealed faculties of the 
mind ? Whatever private or petty ends are frus- 
trated, this end is always answered. Whatever 
the man does, or whatever befalls him, opens 

5 



EMERSON 

another chamber in his soul, — that is, he has 
got a new feeling, a new thought, a new organ. 
Do we not see how amazingly for this end man 
is fitted to the world ? 

What leads him to science ? Why does he track 
in the midnight heaven a pure spark, a luminous 
patch wandering from age to age, but because 
he acquires thereby a majestic sense of power; 
learning that in his own constitution he can set 
the shining maze in order, and finding and car- 
rying their law in his mind, can, as it were, see 
his simple idea realized up yonder in giddy dis- 
tances and frightful periods of duration. If New- 
ton come and first of men perceive that not alone 
certain bodies fall to the ground at a certain 
rate, but that all bodies in the Universe, the uni- 
verse of bodies, fall always, and at one rate ; that 
every atom in Nature draws to every other atom, 
— he extends the power of his mind not only 
over every cubic atom of his native planet, but 
he reports the condition of millions of worlds 
which his eye never saw. And what is the charm 
which every ore, every new plant, every new 
fact touching winds, clouds, ocean currents, the 
secrets of chemical composition and decomposi- 
tion possess for Humboldt ? What but that much 
revolving of similar facts in his mind has shown 



EDUCATION 

him that always the mind contains in its trans- 
parent chambers the means of classifying the 
most refractory phenomena, of depriving them 
of all casual and chaotic aspect, and subordinat- 
ing them to a bright reason of its own, and so 
giving to man a sort of property, — yea, the 
very highest property in every district and par- 
ticle of the globe. 

IBy the permanence of Nature, minds are 
trained alike, and made intelligible to each other. 
In our condition are the roots of language and 
communication, and these instructions we never 
exhaust.] 

In some sort the end of life is that the man 
should take up the universe into himself, or out 
of that quarry leave nothing unrepresented. 
Yonder mountain must migrate into his mind. 
Yonder magnificent astronomy he is at last to 
import, fetching away moon and planet, solstice, 
period, comet and binal star, by comprehending 
their relation and law. Instead of the timid strip- 
ling he was, he is to be the stalwart Archimedes, 
Pythagoras, Columbus, Newton, of the physic, 
metaphysic, and ethics of the design of the 
world. 

For truly the population of the globe has its 
origin in the aims which their existence is to 



EMERSON 

serve ; and so with every portion of them. The 
truth takes flesh in forms that can express it ; 
and thus in history an idea always overhangs, 
like the moon, and rules the tide which rises 
simultaneously in all the souls of a generation. 

Whilst thus the world exists for the mind ; 
whilst thus the man is ever invited inward into 
shining realms of knowledge and power by the 
shows of the world, which interpret to him the 
infinitude of his own consciousness, — it becomes 
the office of a just education to awaken him to 
the knowledge of this fact. 

We learn nothing rightly until we learn the 
symbolical character of life. Day creeps after 
day, each full of facts, dull, strange, despised 
things, that we cannot enough despise, — call 
heavy, prosaic and desert. The time we seek to 
kill : the attention it is elegant to divert from 
things around us. And presently the aroused 
intellect finds gold and gems in one of these 
scorned facts, — then finds that the day of facts 
is a rock of diamonds ; that a fact is an Epiphany 
of God. 

We have our theory of life, our religion, our 
philosophy ; and the event of each moment, the 
shower, the steamboat disaster, the passing of a 
beautiful face, the apoplexy of our neighbor, are 

8 



EDUCATION 

all tests to try our theory, the approximate re- 
sult we call truth, and reveal its defects. If I have 
renounced the search of truth, if I have come 
into the port of some pretending dogmatism, 
some new church or old church, some Schelling 
or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new 
events that are born out of prolific time into 
multitude of life every hour. I am as a bank- 
rupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. 
He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his 
hands, locked himself up and given the key to 
another to keep. 

When I see the doors by which God enters 
into the mind ; that there is no sot or fop, ruffian 
or pedant into whom thoughts do not enter by 
passages which the individual never left open, I 
can expect any revolution in character. " I have 
hope," said the great Leibnitz, "that society may 
be reformed, when I see how much education 
may be reformed." 

It is ominous, a presumption of crime, that 
this word Education has so cold, so hopeless a 
sound. A treatise on education, a convention for 
education, a lecture, a system, affects us with 
slight paralysis and a certain yawning of the jaws. 
We are not encouraged when the law touches it 
with its fingers. Education should be as broad as 

9 



EMERSON 

man. Whatever elements are in him that should 
foster and demonstrate. If he be dexterous, his 
tuition should make it appear ; if he be capable 
of dividing men by the trenchant sword of his 
thought, education should unsheathe and sharpen 
it ; if he is one to cement society by his all- 
reconciling affinities, oh! hasten their action! 
If he is jovial, if he is mercurial, if he is great- 
hearted, a cunning artificer, a strong commander, 
a potent ally, ingenious, useful, elegant, witty, 
prophet, diviner, — society has need of all these. 
The imagination must be addressed. Why al- 
ways coast on the surface and never open the 
interior of Nature, not by science, which is sur- 
face still, but by poetry? Is not the Vast an ele- 
ment of the mind ? Yet what teaching, what book 
of this day appeals to the Vast? 

Our culture has truckled to the times, — to 
the senses. It is not manworthy. If the vast and 
the spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and 
the moral. It does not make us brave or free. 
We teach boys to be such men as we are. We 
do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. 
We do not give them a training as if we believed 
in their noble nature. We scarce educate their 
bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. 
We exercise their understandings to the appre- 

10 



EDUCATION 

hension and comparison of some facts, to a skill 
in numbers, in words ; we aim to make account- 
ants, attorneys, engineers ; but not to make able, 
earnest, great-hearted men. The great object of 
Education should be commensurate with the ob- 
ject of life. It should be a moral one; to teach 
self-trust : to inspire the youthful man with an 
interest in himself ; with a curiosity touching his 
own nature ; to acquaint him with the resources 
of his mind, and to teach him that there is all 
his strength, and to inflame him with a piety 
towards the Grand Mind in which he lives. 
Thus would education conspire with the Divine 
Providence. A man is a little thing whilst he 
works by and for himself, but, when he gives 
voice to the rules of love and justice, is godlike, 
his word is current in all countries ; and all men, 
though his enemies, are made his friends and 
obey it as their own. 

In affirming that the moral nature of man is 
the predominant element and should therefore be 
mainly consulted in the arrangements of a school, 
I am very far from wishing that it should swal- 
low up all the other instincts and faculties of 
man. It should be enthroned in his mind, but if it 
monopolize the man he is not yet sound, he does 
not yet know his wealth. He is in danger of 

ii 



EMERSON 

becoming merely devout, and wearisome through 
the monotony of his thought. It is not less 
necessary that the intellectual and the active fac- 
ulties should be nourished and matured. Let us 
apply to this subject the light of the same torch 
by which we have looked at all the phenomena 
of the time; the infinitude, namely, of every 
man. Everything teaches that. 

One fact constitutes all my satisfaction, in- 
spires all my trust, viz., this perpetual youth, 
which, as long as there is any good in us, we can- 
not get rid of. It is very certain that the coming 
age and the departing age seldom understand 
each other. The old man thinks the young man 
has no distinct purpose, for he could never get 
anything intelligible and earnest out of him. 
Perhaps the young man does not think it worth 
his while to explain himself to so hard and inap- 
prehensive a confessor. Let him be led up with 
a long-sighted forbearance, and let not the sallies 
of his petulance or folly be checked with disgust 
or indignation or despair. 

I call our system a system of despair, and I 
find all the correction, all the revolution that is 
needed and that the best spirits of this age pro- 
mise, in one word, in Hope. (Nature, when she 
sends a new mind into the world, fills it before- 

12 



EDUCATION 

hand with a desire for that which she wishes it 
to know and do. Let us wait and see what is 
this new creation, of what new organ the great 
Spirit had need when it incarnated this new 
Wily A new Adam in the garden, he is to name 
all the beasts in the field, all the gods in the sky. 
And jealous provision seems to have been made 
in his constitution that you shall not invade and 
contaminate him with the worn weeds of your 
language and opinions. The charm of life is this 
variety of genius, these contrasts and flavors by 
which Heaven has modulated the identity of 
truth, and there is a perpetual hankering to vio- 
late this individuality, to warp his ways of think- 
ing and behavior to resemble or reflect your 
thinking and behavior. A low self-love in the par- 
ent desires that his child should repeat his char- 
acter and fortune ; an expectation which the 
child, if justice is done him, will nobly disap- 
point. By working on the theory that this resem- 
blance exists, we shall do what in us lies to defeat 
his proper promise and produce the ordinary and 
mediocre. I suffer whenever I see that common 
sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion 
and way of thinking and being on a young soul 
to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let 
people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own 

13 



EMERSON 

way ? You are trying to make that man another 
you. One's enough. 

Or we sacrifice the genius of the pupil, the 
unknown possibilities of his nature, to a neat 
and safe uniformity, as the Turks whitewash the 
costly mosaics of ancient art which the Greeks 
left on their temple walls. Rather let us have men 
whose manhood is only the continuation of their 
boyhood, natural characters still ; such are able 
and fertile for heroic action ; and not that sad 
spectacle with which we are too familiar, educated 
eyes in uneducated bodies. 

I like boys, the masters of the playground 
and of the street, — boys, who have the same 
liberal ticket of admission to all shops, factories, 
armories, town-meetings, caucuses, mobs, target- 
shootings, as flies have ; quite unsuspected, com- 
ing in as naturally as the janitor, — known to 
have no money in their pockets, and themselves 
not suspecting the value of this poverty ; putting 
nobody on his guard, but seeing the inside of 
the show, — hearing all the asides. There are no 
secrets from them, they know everything that 
befalls in the fire-company, the merits of every 
engine and of every man at the brakes, how to 
work it, and are swift to try their hand at every 
part ; so too the merits of every locomotive on 

14 



EDUCATION 

the rails, and will coax the engineer to let them 
ride with him and pull the handle when it goes 
to the engine-house. They are there only for 
fun, and not knowing that they are at school, 
in the court-house, or the cattle-show, quite as 
much and more than they were, an hour ago, in 
the arithmetic class. 

They know truth from counterfeit as quick as 
the chemist does. They detect weakness in your 
eye and behavior a week before you open your 
mouth, and have given you the benefit of their 
opinion quick as a wink. They make no mis- 
takes, have no pedantry, but entire belief on 
experience. Their elections at baseball or cricket 
are founded on merit, and are right They don't 
pass for swimmers until they can swim, nor for 
stroke-oar until they can row : and I desire to 
be saved from their contempt. If I can pass 
with them, I can manage well enough with their 
fathers. 

Everybody delights in the energy with which 
boys deal and talk with each other ; the mixture 
of fun and earnest, reproach and coaxing, love 
and wrath, with which the game is played; — 
the good-natured yet defiant independence of a 
leading boy's behavior in the school-yard. How 
we envy in later life the happy youths to whom 

15 



EMERSON 

their boisterous games and rough exercise fur- 
nish the precise element which frames and sets 
off their school and college tasks, and teaches 
them, when least they think it, the use and 
meaning of these. In their fun and extreme 
freak they hit on the topmost sense of Horace. 
The young giant, brown from his hunting-tramp, 
tells his story well, interlarded with lucky allu- 
sions to Homer, to Virgil, to college-songs, to 
Walter Scott ; and Jove and Achilles, partridge 
and trout, opera and binomial theorem, Caesar in 
Gaul, Sherman in Savannah, and hazing in Hol- 
worthy, dance through the narrative in merry 
confusion, yet the logic is good. If he can turn 
his books to such picturesque account in his fish- 
ing and hunting, it is easy to see how his reading 
and experience, as he has more of both, will inter- 
penetrate each other. And every one desires that 
this pure vigor of action and wealth of narrative, 
cheered with so much humor and street rhetoric, 
should be carried into the habit of the young 
man, purged of its uproar and rudeness, but with 
all its vivacity entire. His hunting and campings- 
out have given him an indispensable base : I wish 
to add a taste for good company through his im- 
patience of bad. That stormy genius of his needs 
a little direction to games, charades, verses of 

16 



EDUCATION 

society, song, and a correspondence year by year 
with his wisest and best friends. Friendship is an 
order of nobility ; from its revelations we come 
more worthily into nature. Society he must have 
or he is poor indeed ; he gladly enters a school 
which forbids conceit, affectation, emphasis, and 
dulness, and requires of each only the flower of 
his nature and experience ; requires good will, 
beauty, wit and select information ; teaches by 
practice the law of conversation, namely, to hear 
as well as to speak. 

Meantime, if circumstances do not permit the 
high social advantages, solitude has also its les- 
sons. The obscure youth learns there the prac- 
tice instead of the literature of his virtues ; and, 
because of the disturbing effect of passion and 
sense, which by a multitude of trifles impede 
the mind's eye from the quiet search of that fine 
horizon-line which truth keeps, — the way to 
knowledge and power has ever been an escape 
from too much engagement with affairs and pos- 
sessions ; a way, not through plenty and super- 
fluity, but by denial and renunciation, into soli- 
tude and privation ; and, the more is taken away, 
the more real and inevitable wealth of being is 
made known to us. The solitary knows the es- 
sence of the thought, the scholar in society only 

17 



EMERSON 

its fair face. There is no want 'of example of 
great men, great benefactors, who have been 
monks and hermits in habit. The bias of mind 
is sometimes irresistible in that direction. The 
man is, as it were, born deaf and dumb, and dedi- 
cated to a narrow and lonely life. Let him study 
the art of solitude, yield as gracefully as he can 
to his destiny. Why cannot he get the good of 
his doom, and if it is from eternity a settled fact 
that he and society shall be nothing to each 
other, why need he blush so, and make wry faces 
to keep up a freshman's seat in the fine world ? 
Heaven often protects valuable souls charged 
with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting 
them up with their own thoughts. And the 
most genial and amiable of men must alternate 
society with solitude, and learn its severe lessons. 

There comes the period of the imagination to 
each, a later youth ; the power of beauty, the 
power of books, of poetry. Culture makes his 
books realities to him, their characters more bril- 
liant, more effective on his mind, than his actual 
mates. Do not spare to put novels into the hands 
of young people as an occasional holiday and 
experiment ; but, above all, good poetry in all 
kinds, epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the 

18 



EDUCATION 

imagination, we serve them, they will never for- 
get it. Let him read Tom Brown at Rugby, read 
Tom Brown at Oxford, — better yet, read Hod- 
son's Life— Hodson who took prisoner the king 
of Delhi. They teach the same truth, — a trust, 
against all appearances, against all privations, in 
your own worth, and not in tricks, plotting, or 
patronage. 

I believe that our own experience instructs us 
that the secret of Education lies in respecting 
the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he 
shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and 
foreordained, and he only holds the key to his 
own secret. By your tampering and thwarting 
and too much governing he may be hindered 
from his end and kept out of his own. Respect 
the child. Wait and see the new product of Na- 
ture. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. 
Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. 
Trespass not on his solitude. 

But I hear the outcry which replies to this 
suggestion : — Would you verily throw up the 
reins of public and private discipline ; would you 
leave the young child to the mad career of his 
own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy 
a respect for the child's nature ? I answer, — 
Respect the child, respect him to the end, out 

19 



EMERSON 

also respect yourself. Be the companion of his 
thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover 
of his virtue, — but no kinsman of his sin. Let 
him find you so true to yourself that you are the 
irreconcilable hater of his vice and the imper- 
turbable slighter of his trifling. 

The two points in a boy's training are, to keep 
his naturel and train off all but that : — to keep 
his naturel, but stop off his uproar, fooling and 
horse-play; — keep his nature and arm it with 
knowledge in the very direction in which it 
points. Here are the two capital facts, Genius 
and Drill. The first is the inspiration in the well- 
born healthy child, the new perception he has of 
nature. Somewhat he sees in forms or hears in 
music or apprehends in mathematics, or believes 
practicable in mechanics or possible in political 
society, which no one else sees or hears or be- 
lieves. This is the perpetual romance of new life, 
the invasion of God into the old dead world, 
when he sends into quiet houses a young soul 
with a thought which is not met, looking for 
something which is not there, but which ought 
to be there : the thought is dim but it is sure, 
and he casts about restless for means and mas- 
ters to verify it ; he makes wild attempts to ex- 
plain himself and invoke the aid and consent of 

20 



EDUCATION 

the bystanders. Baffled for want of language and 
methods to convey his meaning, not yet clear to 
himself, he conceives that though not in this 
house or town, yet in some other house or town 
is the wise master who can put him in possession 
of the rules and instruments to execute his will. 
Happy this child with a bias, with a thought 
which entrances him, leads him, now into deserts, 
now into cities, the fool of an idea. Let him fol- 
low it in good and in evil report, in good or bad 
company; it will justify itself ; it will lead him 
at last into the illustrious society of the lovers of 
truth. 

In London, in a private company, I became 
acquainted with a gentleman, Sir Charles Fel- 
lowes, who, being at Xanthus, in the yEgean 
Sea, had seen a Turk point with his staff to some 
carved work on the corner of a stone almost 
buried in the soil. Fellowes scraped away the 
dirt, was struck with the beauty of the sculp- 
tured ornaments, and, looking about him, ob- 
served more blocks and fragments like this. He 
returned to the spot, procured laborers and un- 
covered many blocks. He went back to Eng- 
land, bought a Greek grammar and learned the 
language ; he read history and studied ancient 
art to explain his stones ; he interested Gibson 

21 



EMERSON 

the sculptor; he invoked the assistance of the 
English Government ; he called in the succor of 
Sir Humphry Davy to analyze the pigments; of 
experts in coins, of scholars and connoisseurs ; 
and at last in his third visit brought home to 
England such statues and marble reliefs and such 
careful plans that he was able to reconstruct, in 
the British Museum, where it now stands, the 
perfect model of the Ionic trophy-monument, 
fifty years older than the Parthenon of Athens, 
and which had been destroyed by earthquakes, 
then by iconoclast Christians, then by savage 
Turks. But mark that in the task he had 
achieved an excellent education, and become as- 
sociated with distinguished scholars whom he 
had interested in his pursuit ; in short, had 
formed a college for himself ; the enthusiast had 
found the master, the masters, whom he sought. 
Always genius seeks genius, desires nothing so 
much as to be a pupil and to find those who can 
lend it aid to perfect itself. 

Nor are the two elements, enthusiasm and 
drill, incompatible. Accuracy is essential to 
beauty. The very definition of the intellect is 
Aristotle's: "that by which we know terms or 
boundaries." Give a boy accurate perceptions. 
Teach him the difference between the similar and 

22 



EDUCATION 

the same. Make him call things by their right 
names. Pardon in him no blunder. Then he will 
give you solid satisfaction as long as he lives. It 
is better to teach the child arithmetic and Latin 
grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy, be- 
cause they require exactitude of performance ; it 
is made certain that the lesson is mastered, and 
that power of performance is worth more than 
the knowledge. He can learn anything which is 
important to him now that the power to learn is 
secured : as mechanics say, when one has learned 
the use of tools, it is easy to work at a new craft. 

Letter by letter, syllable by syllable, the child 
learns to read, and in good time can convey to 
all the domestic circle the sense of Shakspeare. 
By many steps each just as short, the stammer- 
ing boy and the hesitating collegian, in the school 
debate, in college clubs, in mock court, comes at 
last to full, secure, triumphant unfolding of his 
thought in the popular assembly, with a fulness 
of power that makes all the steps forgotten. 

But this function of opening and feeding the 
human mind is not to be fulfilled by any mechani- 
cal or military method ; is not to be trusted to 
any skill less large than Nature itself. You must 
not neglect the form, but you must secure the 
essentials. It is curious how perverse and inter- 

23 



EMERSON 

meddling we are, and what vast pains and cost 
we incur to do wrong. Whilst we all know in our 
own experience and apply natural methods in 
our own business, — in education our common 
sense fails us, and we are continually trying costly 
machinery against nature, in patent schools and 
academies, and in great colleges and universities. 

The natural method forever confutes our ex- 
periments, and we must still come back to it. 
The whole theory of the school is on the nurse's 
or mother's knee. The child is as hot to learn as 
the mother is to impart. There is mutual delight. 
The joy of our childhood in hearing beautiful sto- 
ries from some skilful aunt who loves to tell them, 
must be repeated in youth. The boy wishes to 
learn to skate, to coast, to catch a fish in the 
brook, to hit a mark with a snowball or a stone ; 
and a boy a little older is just as well pleased to 
teach him these sciences. Not less delightful is 
the mutual pleasure of teaching and learning the 
secret of algebra, or of chemistry, or of good 
reading and good recitation of poetry or of prose, 
or of chosen facts in history or in biography. 

Nature provided for the communication of 
thought, by planting with it in the receiving 
mind a fury to impart it. 'T is so in every art, 
in every science. One burns to tell the new fact, 

24 



EDUCATION 

the other burns to hear it. See how far a young 
doctor will ride or walk to witness a new surgical 
operation. I have seen a carriage-maker's shop 
emptied of all its workmen into the street, to 
scrutinize a new pattern from New York. So in 
literature, the young man who has taste for po- 
etry, for fine images, for noble thoughts, is insa- 
tiable for this nourishment and forgets all the 
world for the more learned friend, — who finds 
equal joy in dealing out his treasures. 

(Happy the natural college thus self-instituted 
around every natural teacher; the young men 
of Athens around Socrates ; of Alexandria around 
Plotinus ; of Paris around Abelard ; of Germany 
around Fichte, or Niebuhr, or Goethe : in short 
the natural sphere of every leading mind) But 
the moment this is organized, difficulties 'begin. 
The college was to be the nurse and home of 
genius; but, though every young man is born 
with some determination in his nature, and is a 
potential genius; is at last to be one; it is, in 
the most, obstructed and delayed, and, whatever 
they may hereafter be, their senses are now 
opened in advance of their minds. They are 
more sensual than intellectual. Appetite and 
indolence they have, but no enthusiasm. These 
come in numbers to the college : few geniuses : 

25 



EMERSON 

and the teaching comes to be arranged for these 
many, and not for those few. Hence the in- 
struction seems to require skilful tutors, of accu- 
rate and systematic mind, rather than ardent and 
inventive masters. Besides, the youth of genius 
are eccentric, won't drill, are irritable, uncertain, 
explosive, solitary, not men of the world, not good 
for every-day association. You have to work for 
large classes instead of individuals ; you must 
lower your flag and reef your sails to wait for the 
dull sailors ; you grow departmental, routinary, 
military almost with your discipline and college 
police. But what doth such a school to form a great 
and heroic character ? What abiding Hope can it 
inspire ? What reformer will it nurse ? What poet 
will it breed to sing to the human race? What dis- 
coverer of Nature's laws will it prompt to enrich 
us by disclosing in the mind the statute which all 
matter must obey ? What fiery soul will it send out 
to warm a nation with his charity ? What tran- 
quil mind will it have fortified to walk with 
meekness in private and obscure duties, to wait 
and to suffer ? Is it not manifest that our aca- 
demic institutions should have a wider scope; 
that they should not be timid and keep the ruts 
of the last generation, but that wise men thinking 
for themselves and heartily seeking the good of 

26 



EDUCATION 

mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, 
should dare to arouse the young to a just and 
heroic life ; that the moral nature should be ad- 
dressed in the school-room, and children should 
be treated as the high-born candidates of truth 
and virtue ? 

So to regard the young child, the young man, 
requires, no doubt, rare patience : a patience 
that nothing but faith in the remedial forces of 
the soul can give. You see his sensualism ; you 
see his want of those tastes and perceptions 
which make the power and safety of your char- 
acter. Very likely. But he has something else. 
If he has his own vice, he has its correlative 
virtue. Every mind should be allowed to make 
its own statement in action, and its balance will 
appear. In these judgments one needs that fore- 
sight which was attributed to an eminent re- 
former, of whom it was said, " his patience could 
see in the bud of the aloe the blossom at the 
end of a hundred years." Alas for the cripple 
Practice when it seeks to come up with the bird 
Theory, which flies before it. Try your design 
on the best school. The scholars are of all ages 
and temperaments and capacities. It is difficult 
to class them, some are too young, some are 
slow, some perverse. Each requires so much 

27 



EMERSON 

consideration, that the morning hope of the 
teacher, of a day of love and progress, is often 
closed at evening by despair. Each single case, 
the more it is considered, shows more to be 
done ; and the strict conditions of the hours, on 
one side, and the number of tasks, on the other. 
Whatever becomes of our method, the condi- 
tions stand fast, — six hours, and thirty, fifty, 
or a hundred and fifty pupils. Something must 
be done, and done speedily, and in this distress 
the wisest are tempted to adopt violent means, 
to proclaim martial law, corporal punishment, 
mechanical arrangement, bribes, spies, wrath, 
main strength and ignorance, in lieu of that wise 
genial providential influence they had hoped, and 
yet hope at some future day to adopt. Of course 
the devotion to details reacts injuriously on the 
teacher. He cannot indulge his genius, he cannot 
delight in personal relations with young friends, 
when his eye is always on the clock, and twenty 
classes are to be dealt with before the day is done. 
Besides, how can he please himself with genius, 
and foster modest virtue ? A sure proportion of 
rogue and dunce finds its way into every school 
and requires a cruel share of time, and the gentle 
teacher, who wished to be a Providence to youth, 
is grown a martinet, sore with suspicions ; knows 

28 



EDUCATION 

as much vice as the judge of a police court, and 
his love of learning is lost in the routine of 
grammars and books of elements. 

A rule is so easy that it does not need a man 
to apply it ; an automaton, a machine, can be 
made to keep a school so. It facilitates labor 
and thought so much that there is always the 
temptation in large schools to omit the endless 
task of meeting the wants of each single mind, 
and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful 
cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, 
to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be 
done for masses, what must be done reverently, 
one by one : say rather, the whole world is 
needed for the tuition of each pupil. The advan- 
tages of this system of emulation and display are 
so prompt and obvious, it is such a time-saver, 
it is so energetic on slow and on bad natures, 
and is of so easy application, needing no sage or 
poet, but any tutor or schoolmaster in his first 
term can apply it, — that it is not strange that 
this calomel of culture should be a popular medi- 
cine. On the other hand, total abstinence from 
this drug, and the adoption of simple discipline 
and the following of nature, involves at once im- 
mense claims on the time, the thoughts, on the 
life of the teacher. It requires time, use, insight, 

29 



EMERSON 

event, all the great lessons and assistances of 
God ; and only to think of using it implies char- 
acter and profoundness ; to enter on this course 
of discipline is to be good and great. It is pre- 
cisely analogous to the difference between the 
use of corporal punishment and the methods of 
love. It is so easy to bestow on a bad boy a 
blow, overpower him, and get obedience without 
words, that in this world of hurry and distrac- 
tion, who can wait for the returns of reason 
and the conquest of self ; in the uncertainty too 
whether that will ever come ? And yet the famil- 
iar observation of the universal compensations 
might suggest the fear that so summary a stop 
of a bad humor was more jeopardous than its 
continuance. 

Now the correction of this quack practice is 
to import into Education the wisdom of life. 
Leave this military hurry and adopt the pace of 
Nature. Her secret is patience. Do you know 
how the naturalist learns all the secrets of the 
forest, of plants, of birds, of beasts, of reptiles, 
of fishes, of the rivers and the sea ? When he 
goes into the woods the birds fly before him and 
he finds none ; when he goes to the river-bank, 
the fish and the reptile swim away and leave 
him alone. His secret is patience ; he sits down, 

30 



EDUCATION 

and sits still ; he is a statue ; he is a log. These 
creatures have no value for their time, and he 
must put as low a rate on his. By dint of obsti- 
nate sitting still, reptile, fish, bird, and beast, 
which all wish to return to their haunts, begin 
to return. He sits still ; if they approach, he 
remains passive as the stone he sits upon. They 
lose their fear. They have curiosity too about 
him. By and by the curiosity masters the fear, 
and they come swimming, creeping and flying 
towards him ; and as he is still immovable, they 
not only resume their haunts and their ordinary 
labors and manners, show themselves to him in 
their work-day trim, but also volunteer some de- 
gree of advances towards fellowship and good 
understanding with a biped who behaves so civ- 
illy and well. Can you not baffle the impatience 
and passion of the child by your tranquillity ? 
Can you not wait for him, as Nature and Provi- 
dence do ? Can you not keep for his mind and 
ways, for his secret, the same curiosity you give 
to the squirrel, snake, rabbit, and the sheldrake 
and the deer ? He has a secret ; wonderful meth- 
ods in him ; he is, — every child, — a new style 
of man ; give him time and opportunity. Talk 
of Columbus and Newton ! I tell you the child 
just born in yonder hovel is the beginning of a 

3i 



EMERSON 

revolution as great as theirs. But you must have 
the believing and prophetic eye. _Have the self- 
command you wish to inspire, / Your teaching 
and discipline must have the reserve and tacitur- 
nity of Nature. Teach them to hold their tongues 
by holding your own. jSay little ; do not snarl ; 
do not chide ; but govern by the eye. See what 
they need, and that the right thing is done. 

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting 
particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No 
discretion that can be lodged with a school-com- 
mittee, with the overseers or visitors of an acad- 
emy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these 
difficulties and perplexities, but they solve them- 
selves when we leave institutions and address 
individuals. The will, the male power, organizes, 
imposes its own thought and wish on others, and 
makes that military eye which controls boys as 
it controls men ; admirable in its results, a for- 
tune to him who has it^ and only dangerous when 
it leads the workman to overvalue and overuse it 
and precludes him from finer means. Sympathy, 
the female force, — which they must use who 
have not the first, — deficient in instant control 
and the breaking down of resistance, is more 
subtle and lasting and creative. I advise teachers 
to cherish mother-wit. I assume that you will 

33 



EDUCATION 

keep the grammar, reading, writing, and arith- 
metic in order ; 't is easy and of course you will. 
But smuggle in a little contraband wit, fancy, 
imagination, thought. If you have a taste which 
you have suppressed because it is not shared by 
those about you, tell them that. Set this law up, 
whatever becomes of the rules of the school : 
they must not whisper, much less talk ; but if 
one of the young people says a wise thing, greet 
it, and let all the children clap their hands. They 
shall have no book but school-books in the room ; 
but if one has brought in a Plutarch or Shak- 
speare or Don Quixote or Goldsmith or any other 
good book, and understands what he reads, put 
him at once at the head of the class. Nobody 
shall be disorderly, or leave his desk without per- 
mission, but if a boy runs from his bench, or a 
girl, because the fire falls, or to check some in- 
jury that a little dastard is inflicting behind his 
desk on some helpless sufferer, take away the 
medal from the head of the class and give it on 
the instant to the brave rescuer. If a child hap- 
pens to show that he knows any fact about as- 
tronomy, or plants, or birds, or rocks, or history, 
that interests him and you, hush all the classes 
and encourage him to tell it so that all may hear. 
Then you have made your school-room like the 

33 



EMERSON 

world. Of course you will insist on modesty in 
the children, and respect to their teachers, but if 
the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that 
you are wrong and sets you right, hug him ! 

To whatsoever upright mind, to whatsoever 
beating heart I speak, to you it is committed to 
educate men. By simple living, by an illimitable 
soul, you inspire, you correct, you instruct, you 
raise, you embellish all. By your own act you 
teach the beholder how to do the practicable. 
According to the depth from which you draw 
your life, such is the depth not only of your 
strenuous effort, but of your manners and pre- 
sence. 

The beautiful nature of the world has here 
blended your happiness with your power. Work 
straight on in absolute duty, and you lend an 
arm and an encouragement to all the youth of 
the universe. Consent yourself to be an organ 
of your highest thought, and lo ! suddenly you 
put all men in your debt, and are the fountain 
of an energy that goes pulsing on with waves of 
benefit to the borders of society, to the circum- 
ference of things. 



CULTURE IN EDUCATION 



\ 



II 

CULTURE IN EDUCATION 

Let us make our education brave and preven- 
tive. Politics is an after-work, a poor patching. 
We are always a little late. The evil is done, the 
law is passed, and we begin the uphill agita- 
tion for repeal of that of which we ought to have 
prevented the enacting. We shall one day learn 
to supersede politics by education. What we call 
our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gam- 
bling, intemperance, is only medicating the symp- 
toms. We must begin higher up, namely, in Ed- 
ucation. 

Our arts and tools give to him who can handle 
them much the same advantage over the novice, 
as if you extended his life ten, fifty, or a hundred 
years. And I think it the part of good sense to 
provide every fine soul with such culture, that it 
shall not, at thirty or forty years, have to say, 
" This which I might do is made hopeless through 
my want of weapons." 

But it is conceded that much of our training 
fails of effect ; that all success is hazardous and 

37 



EMERSON 

rare ; that a large part of our cost and pains is 
thrown away. Nature takes the matter into her 
own hands, and, though we must not omit any jot 
of our system, we can seldom be sure that it has 
availed much, or that as much good would not 
have accrued from a different system. 

Books, as containing the finest records of hu- 
man wit, must always enter into our notion of 
culture. The best heads that ever existed, Peri- 
cles, Plato, Julius Caesar, Shakspeare, Goethe, 
Milton, were well-read, universally educated men, 
and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their 
opinion has weight, because they had means of 
knowing the opposite opinion. We look that a 
great man should be a good reader, or, in propor- 
tion to the spontaneous power, should be the 
assimilating power. Good criticism is very rare, 
and always precious. I am always happy to meet 
persons who perceive the transcendent super- 
iority of Shakspeare over all other writers. I 
like people who like Plato. Because this love does 
not consist with self-conceit. 

But books are good only as far as a boy is 
ready for them. He sometimes gets ready very 
slowly. You send your child to the schoolmaster, 
but 't is the school-boys who educate him. You 
send him to the Latin class, but much of his tui- 

38 



CULTURE IN EDUCATION 

tion comes, on his way to school, from the shop- 
windows. You like the strict rules and the long 
terms ; and he finds his best leading in a by-way 
of his own, and refuses any companions but of 
his choosing. He hates the grammar and Gradus, 
and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. 
Well, the boy is right ; and you are not fit to 
direct his bringing up, if your theory leaves out 
his gymnastic training. Archery, cricket, gun 
and fishing-rod, horse and boat, are all educators, 
liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress, and the 
street talk ; and — provided only the boy has re- 
sources, and is of a noble and ingenious strain — 
these will not serve him less than the books. He 
learns chess, whist, dancing, and theatricals. The 
father observes that another boy has learned 
algebra and geometry in the same time. But the 
first boy has acquired much more than these 
poor games along with them. He is infatuated 
for weeks with whist and chess ; but presently 
will find out, as you did, that when he rises from 
the game too long played, he is vacant and for- 
lorn, and despises himself. Thenceforward it 
takes place with other things, and has its due 
weight in his experience. These minor skills and 
accomplishments, for example, dancing, are tick- 
ets of admission to the dress-circle of mankind, 

39 



EMERSON 

and the being master of them enables the youth 
to judge intelligently of much, on which, other- 
wise, he would give a pedantic squint. Landor 
said, " I have suffered more from my bad dan- 
cing, than from all the misfortunes and miseries 
of my life put together." Provided always the boy 
is teachable (for we are not proposing to make a 
statue out of punk), foot-ball, cricket, archery, 
swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding, are 
lessons in the art of power, which it is his main 
business to learn; — riding, specially, of which 
Lord Herbert of Cherbury said, "A good rider on 
a good horse is as much above himself and others 
as the world can make him." Besides, the gun, 
fishing-rod, boat, and horse constitute, among all 
who use them, secret freemasonries. They are 
as if they belonged to one club. 

There is also a negative value in these arts. 
Their chief use to the youth is, not amusement, 
but to be known for what they are, and not to 
remain to him occasions of heartburn. We are 
full of superstitions. Each class fixes its eyes on 
the advantages it has not ; the refined, on rude 
strength, the democrat, on birth and breeding. 
One of the benefits of a college education is, to 
show the boy its little avail. I knew a leading 
man in a leading city, who, having set his heart 

40 



CULTURE IN EDUCATION 

on an education at the university, and missed it, 
could never quite feel himself the equal of his 
own brothers who had gone thither. His easy 
superiority to multitudes of professional men 
could never quite countervail to him this imagi- 
nary defect. Balls, riding, wine-parties, and bil- 
liards pass to a poor boy for something fine and 
romantic, which they are not ; and a free admis- 
sion to them on an equal footing, if it were pos- 
sible, only once or twice, would be worth ten 
times its cost, by undeceiving them. 

Let me say here, that culture cannot begin 
too early. In talking with scholars, I observe 
that they lost on ruder companions those years 
of boyhood which alone could give imaginative 
literature a religious and infinite quality in their 
esteem. I find, too, that the chance for apprecia- 
tion is much increased by being the son of an 
appreciator, and that these boys who now grow 
up are caught not only years too late, but two or 
three births too late, to make the best scholars 
of. And I think it a presentable motive to a 
scholar, that, as, in an old community, a well- 
born proprietor is usually found, after the first 
heats of youth, to be a careful husband, and to 
feel a habitual desire that the estate shall suffer 
no harm by his administration, but shall be de- 

4i 






EMERSON 

livered down to the next heir in as good condi- 
tion as he received it ; — so, a considerate man 
will reckon himself a subject of that secular me- 
lioration by which mankind is mollified, cured, 
and refined, and will shun every expenditure of 
his forces on pleasure or gain, which will jeopard 
this social and secular accumulation. 

The fossil strata show us that Nature began 
with rudimental forms, and rose to the more 
complex, as fast as the earth was fit for their 
dwelling-place ; and that the lower perish, as the 
higher appear. Very few of our race can be said 
to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking 
to us some remains of the preceding inferior 
quadruped organization. We call these millions 
men ; but they are not yet men. Half engaged 
in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the 
music that can be brought to disengage him. If 
Love, red Love, with tears and joy ; if Want with 
his scourge ; if War with his cannonade ; if 
Christianity with his charity ; if Trade with its 
money ; if Art with its portfolios ; if Science 
with her telegraphs through the deeps of space 
and time ; can set his dull nerves throbbing, and 
by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break 
its walls, and let the new creature emerge erect 
and free, — make way, and sing paean ! The age 

42 



CULTURE IN EDUCATION 

of the quadruped is to go out, — the age of the 
brain and of the heart is to come in. The time 
will come when the evil forms we have known 
can no more be organized. Man's culture can 
spare nothing, wants all the material. He is to 
convert all impediments into instruments, all 
enemies into power. The formidable mischief 
will only make the more useful slave. And if one 
shall read the future of the race hinted in the 
organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, 
and the corresponding impulse to the Better in 
the human being, we shall dare affirm that there 
is nothing he will not overcome and convert, 
until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and 
gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, 
and the hells into benefit. 



EDUCATION FOR POWER 



Ill 

EDUCATION FOR POWER 

There is not yet any inventory of a man's 
faculties, any more than a bible of his opinions. 
Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human 
being? There are men, who, by their sympa- 
thetic attractions, carry nations with them, and 
lead the activity of the human race. And if there 
be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man 
goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there 
are men whose magnetisms are of that force to 
draw material and elemental powers, and, where 
they appear, immense instrumentalities organize 
around them. Life is a search after power ; and 
this is an element with which the world is so sat- 
urated, — there is no chink or crevice in which 
it is not lodged, — that no honest seeking goes 
unrewarded. A man should prize events and pos- 
sessions, as the ore in which this fine mineral 
is found ; and he can well afford to let events 
and possessions, and the breath of the body go, 
if their value has been added to him in the shape 
of power. If he have secured the elixir, he can 

47 



EMERSON 

spare the wide gardens from which it was distilled. 
A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to per- 
form, is the end to which nature works, and the 
education of the will is the flowering and result 
of all this geology and astronomy. 

We must reckon success a constitutional trait. 
Courage, — the old physicians taught (and their 
meaning holds, if their physiology is a little 
mythical), — courage, or the degree of life, is as 
the degree of circulation of the blood in the 
arteries. "During passion, anger, fury, trials of 
strength, wrestling, fighting, a large amount of 
blood is collected in the arteries, the mainte- 
nance of bodily strength requiring it, and but 
little is sent into the veins. This condition is 
constant with intrepid persons." Where the 
arteries hold their blood, is courage and adven- 
ture possible. Where they pour it unrestrained 
into the veins, the spirit is low and feeble. For 
performance of great mark, it needs extraordi- 
nary health. If Eric is in robust health, and has 
slept well, and is at the top of his condition, and 
thirty years old, at his departure from Green- 
land, he will steer west, and his ships will reach 
Newfoundland. But take out Eric, and put in 
a stronger and bolder man, — Biorn, or Thorfin, 
— and the ships will, with just as much ease, 

48 



EDUCATION FOR POWER 

sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred 
miles farther, and reach Labrador and New Eng- 
land. There is no chance in results. With adults, 
as with children, one class enter cordially into 
the game, and whirl with the whirling world; the 
others have cold hands, and remain bystanders ; 
or are only dragged in by the humor and vivacity 
of those who can carry a dead-weight. The first 
wealth is health. Sickness is poor spirited, and 
cannot serve any one : it must husband its re- 
sources to live. But health or fulness answers its 
own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inun- 
dates the neighborhoods and creeks of other 
men's necessities. 

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the 
nature of the world. The mind that is parallel 
with the laws of nature will be in the current of 
events, and strong with their strength. One man 
is made of the same stuff of which events are 
made ; is in sympathy with the course of things ; 
can predict it. Whatever befalls, befalls him first ; 
so that he is equal to whatever shall happen. A 
man who knows men, can talk well on politics, 
trade, law, war, religion. For, everywhere, men 
are led in the same manners. 

The advantage of a strong pulse is not to be 
supplied by any labor, art, or concert. It is like 

49 



EMERSON 

the climate, which easily rears a crop, which no 
glass, or irrigation, or tillage, or manures, can 
elsewhere rival. It is like the opportunity of a 
city like New York, or Constantinople, which 
needs no diplomacy to force capital or genius or 
labor to it. They come of themselves, as the 
waters flow to it. So a broad, healthy, massive 
understanding seems to lie on the shore of un- 
seen rivers, of unseen oceans, which are covered 
with barks, that, night and day, are drifted to 
this point. That is poured into its lap, which 
other men lie plotting for. It is in everybody's 
secret ; anticipates everybody's discovery ; and 
if it do not command every fact of the genius 
and the scholar, it is because it is large and slug- 
gish, and does not think them worth the exertion 
which you do. 

This affirmative force is in one, and is not in 
another, as one horse has the spring in him, and 
another in the whip. " On the neck of the young 
man," said Hafiz, " sparkles no gem so gracious 
as enterprise." Import into any stationary dis- 
trict, as into an old Dutch population in New 
York or Pennsylvania, or among the planters of 
Virginia, a colony of hardy Yankees, with seeth- 
ing brains, heads full of steam-hammer, pulley, 
crank, and toothed wheel, — and everything be- 

50 



EDUCATION FOR POWER 

gins to shine with values. What enhancement to 
all the water and land in England, is the arrival 
of James Watt or Brunei ! In every company, 
there is not only the active and passive sex, but 
in both men and women, a deeper and more im- 
portant sex of mind, namely, the inventive or 
creative class of both men and women, and the 
uninventive or accepting class. Each plus man 
represents his set, and, if he have the accidental 
advantage of personal ascendency, — which im- 
plies neither more nor less of talent, but merely 
the temperamental or taming eye of a soldier or 
a schoolmaster (which one has, and one has not, 
as one has a black mustache and one a blond), 
then quite easily, and without envy or resistance, 
all his coadjutors and feeders will admit his right 
to absorb them. The merchant works by book- 
keeper and cashier ; the lawyer's authorities are 
hunted up by clerks ; the geologist reports the 
surveys of his subalterns ; Commander Wilkes 
appropriates the results of all the naturalists at- 
tached to the Expedition ; Thorwaldsen's statue 
is finished by stone-cutters ; Dumas has journey- 
men ; and Shakspeare was theatre-manager, and 
used the labor of many young men, as well as 
the playbooks. 

There is always room for a man of force, and 

5i 



EMERSON 

he makes room for many. Society is a troop of 
thinkers, and the best heads among them take the 
best places. A feeble man can see the farms that 
are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. 
The strong man sees the possible houses and 
farms. His eye makes estates, as fast as the sun 
breeds clouds. 

When a new boy comes into school, when a 
man travels, and encounters strangers every day, 
or, when into an old club a new-comer is do- 
mesticated, that happens which befalls, when a 
strange ox is driven into a pen or pasture where 
cattle are kept ; there is at once a trial of strength 
between the best pair of horns and the new-comer, 
and it is settled thenceforth which is the leader. 
So now, there is a measuring of strength, very 
courteous, but decisive, and an acquiescence 
thenceforward when these two meet. Each reads 
his fate in the other's eyes. The weaker party 
finds, that none of his information or wit quite 
fits the occasion. He thought he knew this or 
that : he finds that he omitted to learn the end of 
it. Nothing that he knows will quite hit the mark, 
whilst all the rival's arrows are good, and well 
thrown. But if he knew all the facts in the ency- 
clopaedia, it would not help him : for this is an affair 
of presence of mind, of attitude, of aplomb : the 

52 



EDUCATION FOR POWER 

opponent has the sun and wind, and, in every cast, 
the choice of weapon and mark ; and, when he 
himself is matched with some other antagonist, 
his own shafts fly well and hit. 'Tis a question 
of stomach and constitution. The second man is 
as good as the first, — perhaps better ; but has 
not stoutness or stomach, as the first has, and so 
his wit seems over-fine or under-fine. 

Health is good, — power, life, that resists dis- 
ease, poison, and all enemies, and is conservative, 
as well as creative. Here is question, every spring, 
whether to graft with wax, or whether with clay ; 
whether to whitewash, or to potash, or to prune; 
but the one point is the thrifty tree. A good tree, 
that agrees with the soil, will grow in spite of 
blight, or bug, or pruning, or neglect, by night 
and by day, in all weathers and all treatments. 
Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not 
allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch 
the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had. 
If we will make bread, we must have contagion, 
yeast, emptyings, or what not, to induce fermen- 
tation into the dough : as the torpid artist seeks 
inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by 
friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine. And 
we have a certain instinct, that where is great 
amount of life, though gross and peccant, it has 

53 



EMERSON 

its own checks and purifications, and will be found 
at last in harmony with moral laws. 

We watch in children, with pathetic interest, 
the degree in which they possess recuperative 
force. When they are hurt by us, or by each 
other, or go to the bottom of the class, or miss 
the annual prizes, or are beaten in the game, — 
if they lose heart, and remember the mischance 
in their chamber at home, they have a serious 
check. But if they have the buoyancy and resist- 
ance that preoccupies them with new interest in 
the new moment, — the wounds cicatrize, and the 
fibre is the tougher for the hurt. 

Success goes thus invariably with a certain 
plus or positive power : an ounce of power must 
balance an ounce of weight. And, though a man 
cannot return into his mother's womb, and be 
born with new amounts of vivacity, yet there are 
two economies, which are the best succedanea 
which the case admits. The first is, the stop- 
ping off decisively our miscellaneous activity, and 
concentrating our force on one or a few points ; 
as the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the 
sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, 
instead of suffering it to spindle into a sheaf of 
twigs. 

"Enlarge not thy destiny," said the oracle: 

54 



EDUCATION FOR POWER 

" endeavor not to do more than is given thee in 
charge." The one prudence in life is concentra- 
tion ; the one evil is dissipation : and it makes no 
difference whether our dissipations are coarse or 
fine ; property and its cares, friends, and a social 
habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Every- 
thing is good which takes away one plaything 
and delusion more, and drives us home to add 
one stroke of faithful work. Friends, books, pic- 
tures, lower duties, talents, flatteries, hopes, — all 
are distractions which cause oscillations in our 
giddy balloon, and make a good poise and a 
straight course impossible. You must elect your 
work ; you shall take what your brain can, and 
drop all the rest. Only so, can that amount of 
vital force accumulate, which can make the step 
from knowing to doing. No matter how much 
faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from 
knowing to doing is rarely taken. *T is a step out 
of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness. 
Many an artist, lacking this, lacks all : he sees the 
masculine Angelo or Cellini with despair. He, 
too, is up to Nature and the First Cause in his 
thought. But the spasm to collect and swing his 
whole being into one act, he has not. The poet 
Campbell said, that " a man accustomed to work 
was equal to any achievement he resolved on, 

55 



EMERSON 

and that, for himself, necessity, not inspiration, 
was the prompter of his muse." 

Concentration is the secret of strength in poli- 
tics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management 
of human affairs. One of the high anecdotes of 
the world is the reply of Newton to the inquiry, 
" how he had been able to achieve his discover- 
ies." " By always intending my mind." Or if you 
will have a text from politics, take this from 
Plutarch : " There was, in the whole city, but 
one street in which Pericles was ever seen, the 
street which led to the market-place and the 
council-house. He declined all invitations to 
banquets, and all gay assemblies and company. 
During the whole period of his administration, 
he never dined at the table of a friend." Or if 
we seek an example from trade, — "I hope," said 
a good man to Rothschild, "your children are 
not too fond of money and business : I am sure 
you would not wish that." " I am sure I should 
wish that : I wish them to give mind, soul, heart, 
and body to business, — that is the way to be 
happy. It requires a great deal of boldness and a 
great deal of caution to make a great fortune, 
and when you have got it, it requires ten times 
as much wit to keep it. If I were to listen to all 
the projects proposed to me, I should ruin myself 

56 



EDUCATION FOR POWER 

very soon. Stick to one business, young man. 
Stick to your brewery (he said this to young 
Buxton), and you will be the great brewer of 
London. Be brewer, and banker, and merchant, 
and manufacturer, and you will soon be in the 
Gazette." 

Many men are knowing, many are apprehen- 
sive and tenacious, but they do not rush to a de- 
cision. But in our flowing affairs a decision must 
be made, — the best, if you can ; but any is bet- 
ter than none. There are twenty ways of going 
to a point, and one is the shortest ; but set out 
at once on one. A man who has that presence 
of mind which can bring to him on the instant 
all he knows, is worth for action a dozen men 
who know as much, but can only bring it to light 
slowly. The good Speaker in the House is not 
the man who knows the theory of parliamentary 
tactics, but the man who decides off-hand. The 
good judge is not he who does hair-splitting jus- 
tice to every allegation, but who, aiming at sub- 
stantial justice, rules something intelligible for 
the guidance of suitors. The good lawyer is not 
the man who has an eye to every side and angle 
of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, 
but who throws himself on your part so heartily, 
that he can get you out of a scrape. Dr. John- 

57 



EMERSON 

son said, in one of his flowing sentences : " Mis- 
erable beyond all names of wretchedness is that 
unhappy pair, who are doomed to reduce before- 
hand to the principles of abstract reason all the 
details of each domestic day. There are cases 
where little can be said, and much must be 
done." 

The second substitute for temperament is 
drill, the power of use and routine. The hack is 
a better roadster than the Arab barb. In chem- 
istry, the galvanic stream, slow, but continuous, 
is equal in power to the electric spark, and is, in 
our arts, a better agent. So in human action, 
against the spasm of energy, we offset the con- 
tinuity of drill. We spread the same amount of 
force over much time, instead of condensing it 
into a moment. 'T is the same ounce of gold 
here in a ball, and there in a leaf. At West 
Point, Colonel Buford, the chief engineer, pounded 
with a hammer on the trunnions of a cannon, 
until he broke them off. He fired a piece of 
ordnance some hundred times in swift succes- 
sion, until it burst. Now which stroke broke 
the trunnion ? Every stroke. Which blast burst 
the piece ? Every blast. " Diligence passe sens" 
Henry VIII was wont to say, or, great is drill. 
John Kemble said that the worst provincial com- 

58 



EDUCATION FOR POWER 

pany of actors would go through a play better than 
the best amateur company. Basil Hall likes to 
show that the worst regular troops will beat the 
best volunteers. Practice is nine tenths. A course 
of mobs is good practice for orators. All the 
great speakers were bad speakers at first. 
Stumping it through England for seven years 
made Cobden a consummate debater. Stump- 
ing it through New England for twice seven 
trained Wendell Phillips. The way to learn Ger- 
man is, to read the same dozen pages over and 
over a hundred times, till you know every word 
and particle in them and can pronounce and 
repeat them by heart. No genius can recite a 
ballad at first reading, so well as mediocrity can 
at the fifteenth or twentieth reading. The rule 
for hospitality and Irish " help," is, to have the 
same dinner every day throughout the year. At 
last, Mrs. O'Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a 
nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests 
are well served. A humorous friend of mine 
thinks, that the reason why Nature is so perfect 
in her art, and gets up such inconceivably fine 
sunsets, is, that she has learned how, at last, by 
dint of doing the same thing so very often. 
Cannot one converse better on a topic on which 
he has experience, than on one which is new? 

59 



EMERSON 

Men whose opinion is valued on 'Change, are 
only such as have a special experience, and off 
that ground their opinion is not valuable. " More 
are made good by exercitation, than by nature," 
said Democritus. The friction in nature is so 
enormous that we cannot spare any power. It is 
not question to express our thought, to elect our 
way, but to overcome resistances of the medium 
and material in everything we do. Hence the 
use of drill, and the worthlessness of amateurs 
to cope with practitioners. Six hours every day 
at the piano, only to give facility of touch ; six 
hours a day at painting, only to give command 
of the odious materials, oil, ochres, and brushes. 
The masters say that they know a master in 
music, only by seeing the pose of the hands on 
the keys; — so difficult and vital an act is the 
command of the instrument. To have learned the 
use of the tools, by thousands of manipulations ; 
to have learned the arts of reckoning, by endless 
adding and dividing, is the power of the mechanic 
and the clerk. 

I remarked in England, in confirmation of a 
frequent experience at home, that, in literary 
circles, the men of trust and consideration, book- 
makers, editors, university deans and professors, 
bishops, too, were by no means men of the largest 

60 



EDUCATION FOR POWER 

literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary 
intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity 
and working talent. Indifferent hacks and me- 
diocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a 
lucrative point, or by working power, over mul- 
titudes of superior men, in Old as in New Eng- 
land. 

I have not forgotten that there are sublime 
considerations which limit the value of talent and 
superficial success. We can easily overpraise the 
vulgar hero. There are sources on which we have 
not drawn. I know what I abstain from. But 
this force or spirit, being the means relied on by 
Nature for bringing the work of the day about, — 
as far as we attach importance to household life, 
and the prizes of the world, we must respect that. 
And I hold, that an economy may be applied to 
it ; it is as much a subject of exact law and arith- 
metic as fluids and gases are ; it may be hus- 
banded, or wasted ; every man is efficient only as 
he is a container or vessel of this force, and never 
was any signal act or achievement in history, but 
by this expenditure. This is not gold, but the 
gold-maker ; not the fame, but the exploit. 

If these forces and this husbandry are within 
reach of our will, and the laws of them can be 
read, we infer that all success, and all conceiv- 

61 



EMERSON 

able benefit for man, is also, first or last, within 
his reach, and has its own sublime economies by 
which it may be attained. The world is mathe- 
matical, and has no casualty, in all its vast and 
flowing curve. Success has no more eccentricity, 
than the gingham and muslin we weave in our 
mills. I know no more affecting lesson to our 
busy, plotting New England brains, than to go 
into one of the factories with which we have 
lined all the water-courses in the States. A man 
hardly knows how much he is a machine, until 
he begins to make telegraph, loom, press, and 
locomotive, in his own image. But in these, he is 
forced to leave out his follies and hindrances, so 
that when we go to the mill, the machine is more 
moral than we. Let a man dare go to a loom, 
and see if he be equal to it. Let machine con- 
front machine, and see how they come out. The 
world-mill is more complex than the calico-mill, 
and the architect stooped less. In the gingham- 
mill, a broken thread or a shred spoils the web 
through a piece of a hundred yards, and is traced 
back to the girl that wove it, and lessens her 
wages. The stockholder, on being shown this, 
rubs his hands with delight. Are you so cunning, 
Mr. Profitloss, and do you expect to swindle your 
master and employer, in the web you weave? 

62 



EDUCATION FOR POWER 

A day is a more magnificent cloth than any mus- 
lin, the mechanism that makes it is infinitely cun- 
ninger, and you shall not conceal the sleazy, fraud- 
ulent, rotten hours you have slipped into the 
piece, nor fear that any honest thread, or straighter 
steel, or more inflexible shaft, will not testify in 
the web. 



THE TRAINING OF MANUAL 

WORK 



IV 

THE TRAINING OF MANUAL 

WORK 

Quite apart from the emphasis which the times 
give to the doctrine, that the manual labor of 
society ought to be shared among all the mem- 
bers, there are reasons proper to every indi- 
vidual, why he should not be deprived of it. The 
use of manual labor is one which never grows 
obsolete, and which is inapplicable to no person. 
A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft 
for his culture. We must have a basis for our 
higher accomplishments, our delicate entertain- 
ments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of 
our hands. We must have an antagonism in the 
tough world for all the variety of our spiritual 
faculties, or they will not be born. Manual labor 
is the study of the external world. The advan- 
tage of riches remains with him who procured 
them, not with the heir. When I go into my 
garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such 
an exhilaration and health, that I discover that I 
have been defrauding myself all this time in let- 
ting others do for me what I should have done 

6 7 



EMERSON 

with my own hands. But not only health, but 
education is in the work. Is it possible that I 
who get indefinite quantities of sugar, hominy, 
cotton, buckets, crockery-ware, and letter-paper, 
by simply signing my name once in three months 
to a check in favor of John Smith & Co., traders, 
get the fair share of exercise to my faculties by 
that act, which nature intended for me in making 
all these far-fetched matters important to my 
comfort? It is Smith himself, and his carriers, 
and dealers, and manufacturers, it is the sailor, 
the hide-drogher, the butcher, the negro, the 
hunter, and the planter, who have intercepted 
the sugar of the sugar, and the cotton of the 
cotton. They have got the education, I only the 
commodity. This were all very well if I were 
necessarily absent, being detained by work of 
my own, like theirs, work of the same faculties ; 
then should I be sure of my hands and feet, but 
now I feel some shame before my wood-chopper, 
my ploughman, and my cook, for they have some 
sort of self-sufficiency, they can contrive without 
my aid to bring the day and year round, but I 
depend on them, and have not earned by use a 
right to my arms and feet. 

Consider further the difference between the 
first and second owner of property. Every species 

68 



TRAINING OF MANUAL WORK 

of property is preyed on by its own enemies, as 
iron by rust ; timber by rot ; cloth by moths ; pro- 
visions by mould, putridity, or vermin ; money 
by thieves ; an orchard by insects ; a planted field 
by weeds and the inroad of cattle ; a stock of cat- 
tle by hunger ; a road by rain and frost ; a bridge 
by freshets. And whoever takes any of these 
things into his possession, takes the charge of de- 
fending them from this troop of enemies, or of 
keeping them in repair. A man who supplies 
his own want, who builds a raft or a boat to go 
a-fishing, finds it easy to calk it, or put in a thole- 
pin, or mend the rudder. What he gets only as fast 
as he wants for his own ends, does not embarrass 
him, or take away his sleep with looking after. 
But when he comes to give all the goods he has 
year after year collected, in one estate to his son, 
— house, orchard, ploughed land, cattle, bridges, 
hardware, wooden-ware, carpets, cloths, provi- 
sions, books, money, — and cannot give him the 
skill and experience which made or collected 
these, and the method and place they have in his 
own life, the son finds his hands full, — not to 
use these things, — but to look after them and 
defend them from their natural enemies. To him 
they are not means, but masters. Their enemies 
will not remit ; rust, mould, vermin, rain, sun, 

6 9 



EMERSON 

freshet, fire, all seize their own, fill him with vex- 
ation, and he is converted from the owner into a 
watchman or a watch-dog to this magazine of old 
and new chattels. What a change! Instead of 
the masterly good-humor, and sense of power, and 
fertility of resource in himself ; instead of those 
strong and learned hands, those piercing and 
learned eyes, that supple body, and that mighty 
and prevailing heart, which the father had, whom 
nature loved and feared, whom snow and rain, 
water and land, beast and fish, seemed all to know 
and to serve, we have now a puny, protected per- 
son, guarded by walls and curtains, stoves and 
down beds, coaches, and men-servants and wo- 
men-servants from the earth and the sky, and 
who, bred to depend on all these, is made anxious 
by all that endangers those possessions, and is 
forced to spend so much time in guarding them, 
that he has quite lost sight of their original use, 
namely, to help him to his ends, — to the prose- 
cution of his love, to the helping of his friend, to 
the worship of his God, to the enlargement of 
his knowledge, to the serving of his country, to 
the indulgence of his sentiment; and he is now 
what is called a rich man, — the menial and run- 
ner of his riches. 

Hence it happens that the whole interest of 

70 



TRAINING OF MANUAL WORK 

history lies in the fortunes of the poor. Know- 
ledge, Virtue, Power, are the victories of man 
over his necessities, his march to the dominion 
of the world. Every man ought to have this 
opportunity to conquer the world for himself. 
Only such persons interest us, Spartans, Romans, 
Saracens, English, Americans, who have stood in 
the jaws of need, and have by their own wit and 
might extricated themselves, and made man 
victorious. 

I do not wish to overstate this doctrine of 
labor, or insist that every man should be a farmer, 
any more than that every man should be a lexi- 
cographer. In general, one may say, that the 
husbandman's is the oldest, and most universal 
profession, and that where a man does not yet 
discover in himself any fitness for one work more 
than another, this may be preferred. But the doc- 
trine of the Farm is merely this, that every man 
ought to stand in primary relations with the work 
of the world, ought to do it himself, and not to 
suffer the accident of his having a purse in his 
pocket, or his having been bred to some dishon- 
orable and injurious craft, to sever him from those 
duties ; and for this reason, that labor is God's 
education; that he only is a sincere learner, he 
only can become a master, who learns the secrets 

71 



EMERSON 

of labor, and who by real cunning extorts from 
nature its sceptre. 

Neither would I shut my ears to the plea of 
the learned professions, of the poet, the priest, 
the lawgiver, and men of study generally; namely, 
that in the experience of all men of that class, the 
amount of manual labor which is necessary to the 
maintenance of a family indisposes and disquali- 
fies for intellectual exertion. I know it often, 
perhaps usually, happens, that where there is a 
fine organization apt for poetry and philosophy, 
that individual finds himself compelled to wait on 
his thoughts, to waste several days that he may 
enhance and glorify one ; and is better taught by 
a moderate and dainty exercise, such as rambling 
in the fields, rowing, skating, hunting, than by 
the downright drudgery of the farmer and the 
smith. I would not quite forget the venerable 
counsel of the Egyptian mysteries, which de- 
clared that " there were two pairs of eyes in man, 
and it is requisite that the pair which are beneath 
should be closed, when the pair that are above 
them perceive, and that when the pair above 
are closed, those which are beneath should be 
opened." Yet I will suggest that no separation 
from labor can be without some loss of power and 
of truth to the seer himself ; that, I doubt not, the 

72 



TRAINING OF MANUAL WORK 

faults and vices of our literature and philosophy, 
their too great fineness, effeminacy, and melan- 
choly, are attributable to the enervated and sickly 
habits of the literary class. Better that the book 
should not be quite so good, and the bookmaker 
abler and better, and not himself often a ludi- 
crous contrast to all that he has written. 



OUTLINE 



I. EDUCATION 

1. Our distribution of intellectual wealth . . 

2. The miracle of intellectual enlargement 

3. Teaching as a solely human function . . 

4. Things and necessities are educational means 

5. Wisdom comes through expression of power 

6. Every experience educates 

7. Every new idea enlarges man's power . . 

8. The world interprets man's mind .... 

9. The educative possibilities of man . . . 

10. Education should develop all valued powers 

1 1. Our education lacks moral breadth . . . 

12. Narrow arrangements defeat its moral purpose 

13. A right attitude toward perpetual youth 

14. Respect the individuality of the child 

15. Social experience and school learning 

16. Solitude in education 

1 7. The culture of the imagination . . . 

18. Child nature is the key to education . 

19. Teaching is a high kinship, not a low tolerance 

20. Genius and drill, nature and knowledge 

21. The gradualness and certainty of growth 

22. Schools must return to natural methods 

23. Receiving and imparting intimately connected 

75 



1 

2 

2 

3 

4 

5 
6 

8 

9 

9 

10 

11 

12 
12 

14 
17 
18 

19 

19 

20 

23 
23 
24 



OUTLINE 

24. The genius of the few neglected ...... 25 

25. Patience and faith needed in teaching .... 27 

26. Failure in teaching and discipline 29 

27. Teaching is a tranquil ministry 30 

28. A school-room like the world 32 

29. The teacher's life influences his teaching ... 34 

II. CULTURE IN EDUCATION 

1. Education as a preventive 37 

2. The broadening power of books 38 

3. Play makes ready for books 38 

4. The negative value of accomplishments ... 40 

5. Culture should begin early 41 

m. EDUCATION FOR POWER 

1. Life is a search after power 47 

2. Success is primarily a constitutional trait ... 48 

3. Concentration as an economy of power .... 54 

4. The continuity of drill conserves power .... 58 

IV. THE TRAINING OF MANUAL LABOR 

1. Manual training a basis for higher powers . . . 6j 

2. The meaning of the mastery of things .... 68 

3. Separation from manual labor means lost power . 72 



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